BIO

Nisveta Kurtagić Granulo

Vlasenica 1962 — Rome 2012

Nisveta Kurtagić Granulo was born in 1962 in Vlasenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She studied architecture at the University of Sarajevo and, while still a student, took part in international workshops in Nicosia, Aleppo and Cairo. She graduated in 1985 with a design for the Sarajevo Central Hospital, which received first prize.

From 1985 to 1992 she worked at Energoinvest, the major Sarajevo design company, where she led the Design and Marketing department on projects in Yugoslavia, Poland, Russia, Greece and Austria. In 1989 she won first prize for design at «Immagine 89»; in the same years she wrote an interior design column for the newspaper UNA.

The war brought her to Sicily. In 1993 she founded Studio EN in Modica, where she practised for twenty years, registered with the Order of Architects of Ragusa, on whose council she served from 2005 to 2009. She designed houses, villas, apartments, agritourism estates, shops and workspaces, and restored historic Sicilian buildings, in a language of white volumes, considered light and essential geometry. She continued her training with Luigi Snozzi and Raffaele Cavadini in Switzerland and through study periods in Barcelona and Amsterdam. In 2002 she completed the postgraduate programme «Metaphysics in Primary Forms» at the University of Sarajevo, devoted to the symbolism of the dome.

From 1994 to 2010 she taught architecture, graphic design and communication for Sicilian training institutions; in 2009 she lectured at the Valle Giulia Faculty of Architecture, Sapienza University of Rome. She sat on the juries of international competitions in Modica, Scicli and Sarajevo.

Alongside architecture she pursued a body of work in printmaking on paper, developed at the International Centre for Graphic Art «Il Bisonte» in Florence and, in 2009, at The Zen art centre in Kyoto, where she studied intaglio in the shodo technique. From 1994 she exhibited in solo and group shows in Italy and abroad; her prints received awards at national and international exhibitions and are held in the collections of the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome, the National Institute of Bosnian Culture in Sarajevo, and private collections in Europe, the United States, Russia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

CHRONOLOGY